Incorporating Collaboration to Foster Voluntary Teaching Himanshu Bansal Department of Design Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati h.bansal@iitg.ernet.in Mehul Agrawal Department of Design Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati a.mehul@iitg.ernet.in Keyur Sorathia Department of Design Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati keyur@iitg.ernet.in ABSTRACT Voluntary organizations in India are facing different issues like economical, political, structural and manpower etc. in their efforts of educating financially constraint children in India. This study aims to investigate problems faced by voluntary teachers and non-teachers willing to teach. This paper proposes the use of collaboration to foster voluntary teaching. Our methodology included qualitative user research (focus group interview with financially constrained children, semi-structured interviews with 15 voluntary teachers and non-teachers), affinity analysis and activity observation. We present insights and analysis of our user research. Voluntary teachers found difficulties in managing their time, finding the appropriate course material and teaching students with different knowledge level in same class. Non-teachers found themselves unable to start voluntary teaching due to lack of confidence and motivation. We also present advantages of collaborative voluntary teaching such as improvement of quality of education, better study material, better teaching techniques, effective discussion on problems occurring in class. Increased preplanning time is found biggest disadvantage of collaborative teaching. Author Keywords Voluntary, Teaching, Collaboration, Education, Motivation INTRODUCTION Education is positively related with economic growth and people's living standard through various means that are: by increasing the efficiency of the labor force and encouraging democracy [2] and thus creating better conditions for good governance, by improving health, by enhancing equality [1]. According to census 2011 [5], literacy rate of India is 74 %. Literacy rate in India is defined as person aged 7 years and above who can both read and write with understanding in any language has been taken as literate. It is not necessary for a person to have received any formal education or passed any minimum educational standard for being treated as literate. Wheeler [15] has articulated that educating today’s youth to have the requisite knowledge, skills and values to shape their lives and world around them successfully is our greatest challenge. As per NSS, 55th round, the illiteracy level and the Monthly Per Capita Consumer Expenditure and the illiteracy rate are inversely related to each other, both in rural and urban areas i.e. that poverty is one of the critical factors determining literacy level of households in India [9]. Briggs, Landry and Wood [3] define volunteers as people who have already freely and willingly provided their time and effort for a non-profit organization longer than six months. In India, there are more than 1,000 Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and voluntary organizations teaching financially constrained people free of charge [7] and uplifting them socially and economically by increasing their value [12]. But these organizations have to face financial, political, structural, professional, ideological, functional and legal constraints in their efforts [12]. Therefore, we targeted to motivate and empower small voluntary teaching groups working in their respective locality which would be independent of external forces like political parties or government and won't require any fund from outside for their own group for their execution e.g. a group of college students wanting to teach voluntarily. Goals of the paper are as following:  To find the problems being faced by voluntary teachers  To find the possible difficulties being faced by concerned people in starting voluntary teaching  To suggest guidelines to solve above problems and difficulties. PROCESS FOLLOWED User Research: We conducted user research in following four stages: Mess Workers A focus group interview was done with the cafeteria Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI’ͷ͸, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1015-4/12/05...$10.00.